glass but two well-heeled Wasp ladies with blue hair having their Waldorf sal- ads. I'm over in the bushes doing my thing. And I hear Gloria let out this wail. I turn, and, I swear to God, Fish- burne has whipped out his scWong and is peeing on the window, right at eye level. We ran like banshees." Finally, Fishburne called Coppola, who was about to start shooting "One from the Heart." He offered Fishburne and Graham work on the crew. "There were not a lot of roles for him out there," says Coppola, who later wrote Fishburne into "Rumble Fish" (1983) and "The Cotton Club" (1984), and cast him in "Gardens of Stone" (1987). "I felt like he was one of my kids," he adds. Fishburne and Graham, with eighty dollars be- tween them and a Fiat with a leaky gas tank, left Brooklyn for California. "We drove drunk," Graham says. "Neither of us had a license. I still have nightmares about that." But while they were on the road a writers' strike was called, and fihn production shut down for the best part of a year. Fishburne got no acting jobs for fifteen months. Instead, he worked as a doorman and a bouncer; he even cleaned offices with Graham, who briefly worked as a janitor in Culver City: "We were both alcoholics-full friggin' fledged," Graham says. "Once I came home from poca- lypse Now,' I was no longer young and cute," Fishburne says. "I became tall, and a bit intimidating to people, par- tially because of the skin that I hap- pen to come in." When people looked at him, they didn't see an eighteen-year- old boy; they saw, he says, "a twenty-six- year-old black male. Threatening." The only roles he was offered were as thugs and lowlifes. And Fishburne, who didn't deal well with rejection, could be scary. "There was no fucking way I didn't have some kind of skill," he says. "There was no way I didn't have something to offer. If I had been a white boy, them mother- fuckers would have been dealing with me a whole lot differendy. I didn't hide that. I walked in the room like I know where the fuck I've been, I know who I've been with and I know what I know. And I know I'm a bad motherfucker, and I'm not coming in here trying to kowtow to you motherfuckers to give me a fucking job" After a couple of years of being cast 52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2004 as a villain, Fishburne decided to turn a negative into a positive-to become, as he puts it, "the baddest motherfucker you have ever seen." His audition tech- nique had a take-no-prisoners reckless- ness. To win the role of the mugger in Michael Winner's 1982 movie "Death Wish II" (Fishburne is the guy in the pink shades with his pants down dur- ing the gang bang of Charles Bron- son's maid), he says, he "raped the chair, man." The day he went up for Paul Mazursky's "Willie & Phil" (1980), he ran into Graham and his girlfriend hav- ing a bad trip on psychedelic mush- rooms. He took them along as props. "The fihn happened to be about a guy who teaches in an urban high school, and he's got all these freaky students," Graham says. "He challenges the one making all this trouble, and the kid de- livers Hamlet's soliloqu)T." At the audi- tion, while Graham sorted through the debris of a wastebasket he'd tipped over in the waiting room and his girlfriend shook the water cooler to watch the bub- bles, Fishburne launched into the solilo- quy. Mterward, according to Graham, "the casting director goes, 'O.K., do you think we could do that, but without, you know-' and he just looked at her and went, 'Nah, that's all I got for you toda)T.' And picked us up and walked out of the room. They chased him down the hall and gave him the part." When Fishburne, then twenty-two, was called to audition for "The Cotton Club," his agent told him to prepare a song and a dance step; instead, Fish- burne put on shoes he'd spray-painted red, a pink shirt, and white pants, and walked into the audition, he says, "look- ing like some kind of crazy Mexican- American hoodlum." Gregory Hines asked him what he was going to sing. Fishburne said, "I'm not gonna sing any- thing for you toda)T. If I'm gonna be in this movie, I'm gonna playa gangster, O.K.?" In the end, Fishburne was given the part of the Harlem numbers kingpin Bumpy Johnson. "I knew when he did Bumpy Johnson that he could be the star of a movie," Coppola says. "He had a presence. He has never lost his warmth and sweetness-and depth. A villain is always better when somehow you sense those bottom basements in him." In 1986, Fishburne donned a pur- ple Jheri-Curl wig and palomino chaps to play Cowboy Curtis on "Pee-wee's Playhouse." The part became a cult fa- vorite and, finally, broke Fishburne out of the industry's profile of him. Two years later, he starred as the campus rad- ical-and the only credible figure-in "School Daze," Spike Lee's musical sat- ire about the tensions between middle- class black students. Then he won the role of Jimmy Jump in "King of New York," despite the fact that the direc- tor, Abel Ferrara, had originally con- ceived the part for a white actor. "I had to campaign for that," Fishburne says. "I went to Abel and I said, 'Listen, I have an idea about how this character can be played. And if you give me twenty- four hours to get the character together, I'll come in, present the character to you, and then, if you don't like it, cool. I'll do the part that you want me to do." (He had been pencilled in for the role of the policeman who was eventually played by Wesley Snipes.) Three days later, in the presence of Ferrara and the fihn's star, Christopher Walken, Fish- burne arrived in all of Jimmy Jump's iconic hip-hop flash-bowler, chain, gold tooth. For three hours, he told stories in character. In his version of the role, Jump's menace was bom of glee, not grudge. "Jump loved his life," Fish- burne has said. "He loved the fact that he was fast, he was loose, he could kill people." He got the part. Mter almost twenty fihns, he admitted to the Lon- don Guardian, this was the first time that anyone had given him "something . th " to run WI . B Ut it was John Singleton's landmark "Boyz N the Hood," a shocking ac- count of ghetto violence and anomie, that made him a star. Fishburne first Ô met Singleton when the aspiring young director had just finished his freshman 8 u... year at the University of Southern Cal- L.i.J iforma fihn school and Fishburne was ki " p , PI h " " I wor ng on ee-wee s ay ouse. was in awe of him," Singleton says. "I knew he had just done a fihn with Spike Lee. I asked him questions about it. Mter a while, I got him on the discus- sion of what I was doing with myselE g I just said, 'Hey, maybe one day I'm gonna write something for you.' He's, like, 'How old are you?' 'I'm nineteen, man.' He's like, 'Go on, brother, go => ahead and do it!' " Fishburne was the